Show Me how to Say Goodbye

I’m sitting at the kitchen table, colored pencil in hand, sketching the end of a sunset at our old house. We finished moving here just a few hours ago. Somehow I thought I’d be happy once this tumultuous whirlwind of hauling furniture up and down flights of stairs was finally over. 

Instead, there is a sinking feeling in my chest; like a boat has sailed off without me and I’m stranded on this uninhabitable island. 

I remember seeing this house for the first time in the walkthrough, tip toeing through the empty rooms while my parents discussed the contract with the real estate agent in the kitchen. I wondered who was leaving behind such a clearly personal structure. 

I discovered that some of the window panes in the master bedroom were dotted all around with orange and turquoise paint, and each entrance to another room was marked by a different kind of massive archway. The doors to every bedroom were tall and regal looking, nearly reaching the ceiling, which was also so high that every room felt as if it were a small cathedral. 

The space felt cold and ominously unfamiliar to me, then. Maybe it still does, but I can’t really tell what I feel anymore. 

I suppose people move all the time. But how can they withstand the pain of leaving so much behind? 

My thoughts are interrupted when I hear my parents talking in the living room, their voices suddenly escalating. 

“GET OUT!” screams my mother, her shriek piercing through the entire house. “You piece of shit! You’re an asshole. GET OUT!” 

“You’re a psychopath! What’s wrong with you? You think you can just push me around all day and yell at me and treat me like shit? Then you’re suddenly not happy when I don’t call you the first chance I get? I’ve been trying to move our furniture and unpack all day. I have other things on my mind! Give me fucking break,” my father shouts back.

“No! No. That’s not fair...and for you to not see it that way is just ridiculous. It speaks volumes about the kind of man you are. You’re only aware of yourself. You don’t ask me how I am or check in with me at all—”

“What do you want from me, Andie? I’ve been driving the U-Haul since eight o’clock in the morning, moving our bed and our furniture. I mean, talk about not being fair,” he snaps back.

Silence. I look up from my picture.

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Get out. You can leave.” 

My mother says these words coolly, like she is the only one who has the power to shut herself out. She’d rather ruin any chance of reconciliation than risk getting really hurt. But I hate the way she pretends not to care, like she’s not burning up with sadness on the inside. 

“You’re really going to speak to me like that?” responds my father. Quiet, still. “Fuck. You.”

“Fuck you!”

“FUCK! YOU!” he screams. 

The front door slams. 

Seconds pass where I do not breathe as to preserve the pure and untouched silence that sweeps over the house like nightfall. 

Without seeing her, I can feel the way my mother slumps where she stands. Right now, she is looking at the door, with her brow furrowed in a way she’d never let him see. She cocks her head to the side, and her eyes are lost in thought, her hands rushing up to squeeze herself in an embrace. Why do I feel a guilty string pulling at my heart, telling me to go to her and testify my allegiance? To pull her close to me and whisper, while my head is resting in the curve of her neck, that everything will be okay?

Why am I fighting with myself now?

Go to her. If you go to her now she will smile at you and tell you that you have always been understanding and compassionate. She will tell you she is sorry. She will speak words of love to you, and they will sink deep into your heart and cloud your vision until you forget why you arrived in her arms in the first place and only remember again that she loves you. Go to her. 

But even more than giving in to these desires, I want to fight them. They feel toxic to me, rolling around along my insides and poisoning my body slowly until I belong to her, and only to her. Until the self I’ve never discovered will also be lost to me forever. 

So instead I pick up my pencils and sketchbook and climb the winding staircase up to the second floor, where “my” bedroom sits waiting for me at the end of a dark hallway.

The air feels thicker up here and the floor is dusty with dirty shoe prints. 

When I step foot into the dimly lit bedroom, my heart hurts.

Reality settles on top of me like drying concrete. 

There’s no way I’ll ever be able to crawl out of whatever spell this life has shoved me into. I don’t understand how suddenly I am here, in this place I don’t know. How is it that something which felt so familiar, so constant, so certain, is now completely out of reach? It’s as if that life in my old house is from another universe, and now I have to begin again. 

I’m here, in this town that I don’t at all know, in this house that I don’t at all understand, in this room that I don’t at all belong in. I am trapped in this alternate reality. 

What happened to the reality where my family decided it’d be best to stay put, to not go on an adventure, to not give up the sacred thing, as I now understand it was, we once had? The reality where—instead of cheering on the house hunting, saying I was eager for a change, explaining that I was excited to move when my mother asked me if I was okay, not thinking through what I’d really be leaving behind—I was honest with myself and gave myself enough credit to feel what I needed to feel and say what I needed to say?

I lean against the wall, breathing in the musty air. 

I am lost.

I pick up the duffle bags of clothes discarded by my mattress and make my way to the closet. Beginning to unpack, I fold the clothes and place them on the shelves surrounding me. There’s a mirror across from me, and I see myself for the first time today in its reflection.

She is freckled, blushed, kissed by the sun from a long summer. Her hair falls between her eyes like an unsolved puzzle that somehow communicates more beauty than if it were pieced together. There are her lips, wide at the bottom and smooth at the top. Good for kissing but bad for crying, when despair pulls her into strange contortions of expression. Then her eyes. Somewhat green but mostly blue, tangled up with flecks of moroccan clay. Her face speaks a thousand words to me, I know it, yet there’s not a thing I can understand. 

She furrows her brow. I turn away.

I bend down to place another duffle bag below the mirror. Standing up, I feel the edge tilt against my back, and suddenly the mirror clatters to the floor. 

“Shit,” I mutter, turning it over to make sure the glass didn’t crack. It didn’t.

Thank god.

I stand up again, but I’m met with the shape of a fairly sized square where the mirror used to be. It looks like someone sliced through the wall without ever pushing through the plaster to make a hole. A small loop of rope is nailed to the edge of the square, like a doorknob. I stare at it for a while in the isolation of the closet. 

Is it dangerous to open secret doors in a house I just moved into? Is this door even a door at all? And if so, is it meant to be opened? 

I breathe steadily. My reflection stares back at me from the floor, dimly lit by the singular light bulb poking through the ceiling. 

I could put the mirror back, and pretend the door doesn’t exist. 

Or I could fall into the talons of curiosity and try to open it. 

Curiosity killed the cat, I can hear my mother say to me. 

Like a possessed zombie, I fix my gaze upon the square and step steadily towards it, as the train of time has slowed to a careful crawl, like it always does when unknown entities are readily in one’s grasp. 

The rope suddenly in hand, I gently tug.

Nothing.

I pull harder, but this time can feel a strain, a blockage. Perhaps it opens the other way?

I push it with intention—and it moves, creaking as it slowly swings open to reveal a dark room. I realize that the hinges were on the opposite side of me. 

It’s level with a floor covered by some kind of industrial carpet squares. 

“There’s no choice but to enter.” I whisper, feeling like the star of a new dramatic thriller. 

Hoisting myself onto the carpet, I crawl through the square into a dark room, illuminated in some corners by rays of sunshine that seep through the circular windows on each of the three walls surrounding me. I am by the roof, I understand. The ceiling slants upward and four wooden planks stretch from wall to wall. 

I stand up. By the windows there are clusters of small flower pots, many of them. They are painted in what were probably once very bright colors, however they are covered in so much dust it is hard to tell. Most of the flower pots are empty, yet some have dried out hunks of soil inside. It’s easy to imagine what they must have once looked like. Many tiny sprouts of green cluttered around each window, bending to reach the sunlight. 

Exploring, I walk from wall to wall. Facing the leftmost wall, there are many small pieces of different colored paper, all pinned to the wooden beam. They stretch along the entire plank. I run my fingers along one of the dusty notes, careful not to tear it from its hanging place.  

It’s impossible to make a wrong decision when both options are considered carefully. 

It reads. Another, stuck to the wood with a sewing pin, says,

I feel like I’m floating through time. Like my eyes are seeing, but there’s no one really there. 

So many more...

Their words and expectations try to shape you into their sculpture, their version of beauty. Don’t let it happen. 

I miss you. I thought I knew who I was before I left, but now it seems like I only knew who I was because I had you. 

How do I learn to love this body I was taught to hide, always thinking I was responsible for the unwanted gazes of others?

There’s no other way to put it. 

I love you. 

Oh, how do I win? Show me how to say goodbye.

They seem to go on and on like that, so many little scraps of written thoughts, obviously collected over time. I want to read every single one a million times over. Somehow it feels like they were written precisely for me. 

“The woman who lived here before, her daughter was a poet.” 

I turn around, startled. My mother stands by one of the circular windows, gazing outside, hugging her body as if she is trying not to let herself slip away. How had I not taken notice of her entrance?

“It’s cool, right?” she continues. “Your dad and I also managed to knock down that mirror when we first looked through the house. It’s quite mystifying the first time you discover that little door, isn’t it?”  

She’s still not looking at me, just standing there across the room, her eyes fixed on something far away. 

“We knew that was going to be your room,” she says as she gestures to my bedroom beyond the square door. “With all that airy space and...and, um,” she whisks her hands through the air like she’s trying to catch the right words with her fingers. “whimsicality,” she finally says softly. “It’s whimsical. And once we saw this room, we started to have a good feeling about everything.” 

She smiles to herself, an ever so quiet chuckle sending soft tremors through her body, before her face returns to its worried expression and her arms take their original place, hugging her heart. “It’s so like you to have a secret room,” she says, finally shifting her gaze to me. Her lips struggle to form a small smile, but she furrows her brow instead. 

There’s a gap of nothingness that reverberates through the world, like dark storm clouds overtaking an ocean sky. It’s overpowering and paralyzing. 

“Yeah,” I finally say, clearing the horizon, staring at her from across the way. We are two buoys at sea, grasping for some kind of a steady structure. She continues to look unrestful, running two fingers slowly along her collar bone like she always does when some kind of worry is plaguing her thoughts. “What’s wrong?” I ask, tentative. 

That silence again. 

The silence. I want to scream. Scream at the top of my lungs. 

She walks over to me, her head tilted in loving contemplation. 

“It’s okay to not be okay, Aurora,” she says after a while, face to face with me.  

I don’t respond. 

This sea is relentless, wicked and wild.

“It’s okay to remember, and cry. You can be angry and sad and confused. All at the same time.” Her lips tremble, her eyes suddenly wet with tears.

“Are you afraid to remember?” I whisper, something catching in my throat. She sighs, deep and with longing. 

“I think I’m afraid of letting go.” 

There is her smile again, which stings even to look at. 

“Me too,” I say, the lights in the room blurring together. We are suddenly one in the same, her and I, both of us tied to Earth by this restless storm. “But we don’t have to let go,” I say, taking her hands. “Just because we don’t live there anymore doesn’t mean it never happened.” 

This realization stuns me as it escapes my lips. 

The waves are violent and unforgiving but I am strong. I can let them tug me back and forth yet still stay standing. 

“You’re beautiful,” says my mother. “You have a beautiful mind.” 

I can see the fear inside her eyes, so much like what I feel inside me. 

“So do you,” I answer. “Don’t be afraid.”

“I just want you to be happy,” she says as tear drops glisten down her face. 

“I will be.”

I nod my head, pulling her into an embrace. I know that I mean what I say. I can feel it in every part of me.

We are holding each other as sunlight fades outside the circle windows.

I will be happy here.